Green Zone’: Can you spell naive?

I caught an early screening of “Green Zone” on Sunday. The Paul Greengrass -directed film follows in his style of quick-cut action, hand-held camera work and a story line that sizzles along, daring you to keep up.

That said, it is hardly one of his better movies. This is the guy who directed the last two Jason Bourne films (“The Bourne Supremacy,” “The Bourne Ultimatum”), the post-9/11 drama “United 93” and the you-are-there political mock-doc “Bloody Sunday,” which captured the angst and violence of the 1972 riots in Northern Ireland that featured British soldiers firing on civilians (killing at least 13).

Those four movies, even the two fictional spy sagas, are particularly well made. Greengrass has a good way with both tone and pacing, forging ahead and keeping track of the action even in the midst of multiple cuts. And while he always puts forth a political stance (soldiers who kill civilians are bad), he works hard to give the whole story.

Until “Green Zone,” that is. This is a film that could be summed up in four words: “There were no WMDs.” Wow! Really?

Matt Damon, star of the Bourne series, plays a U.S. Army Warrant Officer who, as U.S. troops surge into Baghdad in 2003, is in charge of a group seeking the ostensible weapons. Only he keeps coming up with zilch.

And so he starts looking for why this could be. “I want to save lives and help people,” he says. His mission brings him in contact with a sleazy CIA officer (Brendan Gleeson), a hawkish Wall Street Journal reporter (Amy Ryan) and a junior-but-arrogant member of the Bush administration (Greg Kinnear) who is all gung-ho about creating a new government in a democratic Iraq.

Pretty soon our noble-minded G.I. discovers that - again, wow! - the whole WMD thing is a hoax, a made-up threat to justify going to war with Saddam Hussein. And the movie, screenplay by Brian Helgeland (“L.A. Confidential,” “Mystic River”), simply plays the issue straight. It’s as if we’ve all been in a time capsule since the invasion and haven’t been aware of the seven ensuing years, a period in which those missing WMDs have become such a joke that no one even bothers to laugh anymore.

“Oh those things,” a conservative friend of mine used to say. “You never really believed that they existed, did you?”

Well, uh, yeah. I did. Silly me.

Anyway, our intrepid protagonist and the CIA guy have a little thing, taking turns telling each other, “Don’t be naive.” Turns out the naive ones were Greengrass and Helgeland.

Or maybe they thought we still were.

Below : The trailer for “Green Zone.”